Ecommerce platform

eCommerce Platform

Saving Money and Time By Focusing on Performance and Speed

In this presentation from eTail 2013, Alan Higley, VP of Internet Marketing for Coolibar, an American apparel retailer focusing on sun protective clothing, shows us how focusing on website speed and performance is a great place to spend time and resources. Higley makes a strong case that performance is one of the most overlooked areas when selecting the right eCommerce platform and gives concreate examples involving performance monitoring, the selection of a high speed dedicated server and more from his experience increasing sales at Coolibar.

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Transcript excerpt:

...So I have to give you a little bit of background, I do not know if I can have show up hands like how many people are familiar with or currently using some sort of a web performance monitoring tool, so looks like just quite a few of you. For those who might not be familiar, basically what performance monitoring typically like on a day like today except I had my phone turned off, we have scripts running on major backbones across the country, so we have New York, Miami, Chicago and LA. There is basically a robot sitting at the internet service provider right at the backbone and that is running a script of our most common e-commerce transaction, so it is visiting our home page, section page, category, product page, it actually does a site search along the way, it goes to a product image, put something in the cart and then goes on to the checkout page, so every 15 minutes that robot on one of our 4 ISPs is running that script. Typically what firm is monitoring comes in key for day like today because it is going tell me if the transaction fails, which it did, since I got back to the room today, I turned on my phone and transaction had failed, there was objects on the pages that were failing to load, that happened today. The total amount of weight in the transaction changed, it went to zero, so again looking at all the assets that are the loading in the process of a 7 step transaction if it is above and below a certain threshold it will give me a warning and basically the whole thing fails, so all 4 of those alerts went off today when my phone failed, but we are back in business, so that is the backbone view and again that is the typical use of a web monitoring platform is to get those alerts to make sure your site is up, but we actually use the tool to look at all the assets that are loading on all those pages and I will talk to you more about the detailed analysis that we did on those pages and what we did to clean up the code.

So in the inner side of web performance monitoring is you could actually simulate the user experience, so we are sampling visitors like every fifth visitor to the site and there is a little beacon on the site that actually records from the visitors perspective what they are doing and in our case, the backbone time was set to 15 seconds the visitor time, by the time it goes over the last mile, may be 30 seconds to go through the whole transaction and everything you get on user experience and differences in browser, operating system, the connectivity, geography and again that is the typical use of these tools, but we took a little bit of different take on it...